🇵🇫 French Polynesia

Where is French Polynesia?

French Polynesia lies in Polynesia, on the continent of Oceania.

It sits in the southern half of the world, roughly 1 670 km from the equator.

Its coastline is about 2 525 km long.

It has no land neighbours — every border it has is with the sea.

How big is French Polynesia?

French Polynesia covers 4 167 square kilometres.

Switzerland is about 9.9 times bigger.

Spread everybody out evenly and you get about 66.6 people on every square kilometre.

That is close to the world average of roughly 60 people per square kilometre.

Who lives in French Polynesia?

About 278 thousand people live in French Polynesia.

People here speak French.

They pay with the CFP franc (₣).

On average, people born here can expect to live about 75 years.

The land of French Polynesia

Its coast runs for about 2 525 km. Walking it end to end, at twenty kilometres a day, would take roughly 126 days.

It lies inside the tropics, which is the single biggest reason its weather is the way it is.

What makes French Polynesia different?

Websites from here often end in .pf.

French Polynesia and the rest of the world

Fewer than one person in every thousand on Earth lives in French Polynesia.

It takes up less than a hundredth of one per cent of all the land in the world.

A country, or a territory?

French Polynesia is not an independent country but a territory. It has its own name, its own borders and often its own laws, but another country speaks for it abroad — it holds no seat of its own at the United Nations, for instance.

That is more common than it sounds. There are dozens of such places around the world: some sit far from the country they belong to, some right beside it. A few govern themselves almost completely and hand over only defence and foreign policy; others are held more closely. How much a territory decides for itself is settled case by case, never by one rule.

On this site territories get a page of their own, because children look them up and because other pages link to them. They are left out of the record lists, though: those rank only members of the United Nations, so that a ranking never mixes countries with places belonging to somebody else.